1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle impact severity identification device, and more particularly, to a vehicle impact severity identification device for identifying the front-impact severity of a vehicle.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Airbags have been standard accessories of cars for quite some time. Now, Whether an airbag should trigger or not depends upon the front-impact severity of the car. There are several prior art algorithms for determining when an airbag should trigger, such as energy and variation of energy analysis, sliding windows algorithms, or analysis of acceleration and variation of acceleration. There also exists a method for triggering an airbag when the integral of the acceleration detected by an acceleration detector exceeds a certain threshold value. However, each of these methods has both advantages and disadvantages, and none of them can consistently identify when an airbag should be triggered. It would be very beneficial, then, if there existed an algorithm that could more precisely identify the severity of a vehicle impact and provide that identification information to an airbag-triggering electrical control unit.